FLINT, Mich. -- Can't decide? Want to see something else?
Let's say you're shopping at one of the Randy Wise Automotive stores in this area, and you decide to check out a vehicle from a different brand at another dealership owned by the group.
Well, just sit tight. The folks at Randy Wise will fetch the vehicle for you or drive you to where it is.
Five dealerships. Ten brands. New or used. Your pick.
The family-owned dealership group calls it "Brand-Venience." It's a big part of why the Wises' vehicle sales grow year after year in a hard-luck city that's losing population.
The coined word came out of a 2012 brainstorming session. Local adman Greg Leach and Vice President Chris Wise, son of group founder Randy Wise, were trying to describe having 10 brand choices within about 20 miles of Flint, Mich.
Besides Chevrolet and Lincoln-Hyundai stores in Flint, the group has a Ford store in Ortonville, a Buick-GMC dealership in Fenton and a Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge-Ram site in Clio.
The group already sold used vehicles at each store as a single, 400-plus unit inventory. Why not new vehicles, too?
"Any salesperson can sell any brand, new or used," says Chris Wise, who doubles as general manager of the Clio store. If a customer wants to see a specific new or used vehicle not at that store, the sales staff doesn't send him or her down the road.
"We bring the car to them, or more often, the salesperson may jump in the car and take them to the other store," he says.
Founder Randy Wise, 67, calls the practice an alternative to losing prospects who don't find what they like at that store.
"Everybody's first obligation is to sell the brand they represent," he says. But if a customer shows up at a store looking for a used vehicle he or she saw in the online Wise inventory, and it's not there, a salesperson will drive him or her to it or have a Wise driver bring it to the customer.
For new-car buyers, fetch-deliver works best when they compare two specific vehicles, Chris Wise says. "It happens multiple times a week -- there are a lot of good products out there," he says.
Dave Olson has been a salesman at the Chevrolet store -- the Wises' original store -- for 26 years.
"I'm a Chevy guy," he says. "Selling something else is a last resort. But if somebody decides not to buy a Chevy, I'll take them to the Buick store or the Ford store."
The Wises encourage salespeople to partner with colleagues at other stores, get store managers closely involved and keep a senior person with deep product knowledge handy to assist.
They won't disclose specifics of the sales compensation plan, "but it has become a recruiting tool for the sales team," Randy Wise says.
The "Brand-Venience" concept is boosting sales. New and used sales rose 23 percent in 2014 to 7,000 vehicles.
Volume is up 4 percent through five months this year.
And service revenue also is rising since the Wises started urging customers to bring their vehicles to the closest Wise store, regardless of brand, two years ago.
Growth's a neat trick in Flint. The city is the 1908 birthplace of General Motors, and its 1936-37 sit-down strike arguably led to the formation of the UAW. As a Buick-Chevrolet manufacturing hub, its 1960s population neared 200,000.
But with GM factories mostly closed, Flint fell below 100,000 residents in 2013. This century alone, 20 percent of Flint residents left. Genesee County planners expect the city's population to drop to 67,000 by 2040.
The original dealership, refurbished in bright blue and gray Chevy livery, is an oasis on Flint's gritty north side.
Along 4 miles of Clio Road marked by shuttered auto dealerships and storefronts repurposed into churches, used-tire stores and the Liquor Cave, the tidy Chevrolet store with rows of freshly washed new vehicles stands out.
Randy Wise says locals appreciate him reinvesting at his original store.
"The neighborhood has rewarded us for staying," he says.
A second Wise competitive advantage is strong community involvement. Randy Wise is immediate past president of the Michigan Automobile Dealers Association, but he's known in the community for chairing United Way fundraising in Flint and five years as head of the Buick Open.
He and Chris support 35 local and national charities including the Flint YWCA and American Junior Golf Association.
"Randy Wise Automotive is Michigan's leading automotive contributor to the United Way," says Kyle Canada, general manager of Randy Wise Lincoln-Hyundai, the other Flint store. "Virtually every employee here contributes."
